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Forum Italicum
47(3) 497–521
‘Volto di Medusa’: ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0014585813497334

self in Petrarch’s Rerum foi.sagepub.com

vulgarium fragmenta
Aileen A Feng
University of Arizona, USA

Abstract
Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a
projection of the poet’s internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading
takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch’s agency. Yet Petrarch’s Laura-Medusa is suggestively
figured as only her disembodied head, a weapon ultimately manipulated by Perseus. This
reversal of agency has an impact on Petrarch’s complicated theory of poetic inspiration,
and reaches beyond the relationship between poet and beloved to encompass another
fraught paradigm of power: the relationship between poet and patron. By recalling the
disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of Laura, and recovering the political symbolism
of the appropriation of her petrifying gaze, Petrarch creates a model of poetic agency that
he uses to stage his relationship to patronage in the Latin Africa and a poem addressed to
his Colonna patrons.

Keywords
Medusa, patronage, Petrarch

L’ombra sua sola fa ’l mio cor un ghiaccio, et di bianca paura il viso tinge; ma li occhi
ànno vertú di farne un marmo. (Petrarca, 2001: 197, 9–14)1

In 1962, Kenelm Foster published one of the first and most often cited articles on the
figure of Medusa in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF), one which con-
tinues to influence scholarship on the subject.2 By investigating whether or not
Petrarch’s Laura functioned as a Dantean beatrice (conduit to God), or as a
Medusa (obstacle to God), Foster argued for a binary opposition between the figures

Corresponding author:
Aileen A Feng, Department of French and Italian, Modern Languages 549, University of Arizona, PO Box
210067, Tucson, AZ 85721-0067, USA.
Email: aafeng@email.arizona.edu
498 Forum Italicum 47(3)

of Beatrice and Laura that would have the former guide Dante towards the Beatific
Vision while the latter’s beauty competed with it and put Petrarch’s soul in danger.
For Foster, Laura-as-Medusa represents Petrarch’s moral arrestment, particularly
in the three so-called Medusa poems3 wherein the beloved is a ‘mere image of the
lover-obsession, almost without moral overtones’ (Foster, 1962: 52–53). He reads
these three poems as the obstacle that Petrarch finally overcomes in the Hymn to
Madonna at the end of the lyric collection (Petrarca, 2001: RVF, 366). In other
words, Petrarch’s final turn toward the Virgin, his proclamation, ‘Medusa et
l’error mio m’àn fatto un sasso’ (2001: v. 111), ‘Medusa and my error have made
me a stone’ (1976: 582), signifies his repentance and overcoming of Laura-Medusa,
the final obstacle in his salvation. In the end, for Foster, the figure of Laura-Medusa
represents the crux of a penitential theme that primarily characterizes the latter half
of the lyric collection, and that permeates the Secretum and Triumphi.
Over the half-century since the publication of Foster’s article, Italian scholarship
has witnessed several theoretical approaches to the figure of Medusa within
Petrarch’s poetics, all of which ultimately come back to the same penitential
theme highlighted in 1962, and almost always in comparison to Dante’s beloved
Beatrice. From theological and Dantean-inspired readings of the letter versus the
spirit, to the psychosexual approach in Freudian studies, and feminist critiques of the
silent, yet menacing, beloved, scholars have tended to emphasize a singular episode
involving the Gorgon – her ability to turn men into stone, and deprive them of life,
like the fallen warriors Perseus encounters in her cave.4 The fixation on Medusa’s
gaze, and emphasis on its arresting qualities has, in part, been due to our taking
Petrarch’s fiction at face value: when in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 129 Petrarch
refers to himself as a ‘pietra morta in pietra viva’ (v. 51), he creates a pun on his name
(Petra-, rock), applying the Dantean maxim ‘nomine sunt consequentia rerum’ (Vita
nova XIII, 4) to create a (super)natural relationship between himself and Laura-
Medusa.5 We have generally linked the pun to its logical counterpart in the figure of
Laura-Medusa, since the notion that Petrarch’s name identifies him as rock legitim-
izes his relationship to the beloved by presenting her as uniquely destined to be his
beloved.6 Yet this brings up a host of issues that are not easily resolved. If Petrarch’s
name is already associated with rock, then it would seem that Laura-Medusa’s pet-
rifying powers would be at best redundant. What is his fear of being turned into
stone when he was always already a rock? In order to assess the paradigm of power
between Petrarch and Laura-Medusa, we must go to Petrarch’s source for the
Medusa myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and consider closely how Petrarch adopts
and deviates from it.
Critics have long privileged the encounter between Perseus and Medusa as the
primary source of Petrarch’s figure of Laura-Medusa, overlooking details in his
poems that would indicate otherwise. When, in poem 197, cited in the epigraph of
this article, Petrarch claims that Laura’s eyes ‘ànno vertú di farne un marmo’ (v. 14),
‘have the power to turn it to marble’ (1976: 342), he describes a power that is only
associated with Medusa after the slaying: while alive, Medusa has the power to turn
men into stone, but it is Medusa’s disembodied head, in the hands of Perseus, that
Feng 499

has the ability to turn men into marble. The material difference between stone and
marble is perhaps less important than the way the semantic difference hints at a
change in Medusa’s power when it is appropriated by Perseus. That is, if Medusa-as-
Medusa turns men to stone, and later Medusa-as-wielded-by-Perseus turns men to
marble, then the difference between stone and marble signals an alteration in
Medusa’s power itself by the fact of its appropriation. The implications thus lead
us to an examination of Medusa’s agency, intact during life, and appropriated by
Perseus in death. A closer look at Petrarch’s Medusa poems reveals a repetition of
the detail concerning the beloved’s gaze and marble and Petrarch’s understanding of
the difference appropriation makes in Ovid’s Medusa. Readers of Petrarch vis-a-vis
Ovid rarely distinguish between the scenes of Medusa’s power in the myth: the
encounter between Perseus and Medusa in her cave, the Perseus and Atlas episode,
or the battle in Cepheus’s palace. They have all traditionally been interpreted as
different means towards the same end: petrification and death. While acknowledging
that Petrarch knew his Ovidian subtext well, scholarship has not paid close enough
attention to the ways in which he engages with the differences between the Medusa
myths that are recounted over the course of the Metamorphoses. In other words,
where both Ovid and Petrarch see a multifaceted Medusa, we, as modern scholars,
have seen a one-dimensional character: a morally damning figure, the idol in Foster’s
‘cult of Laura-laurel’ that Petrarch ultimately rejects for a Christian salvation.
The distinction between Medusa’s agency in turning men to stone and Perseus’s
agency in using her head to turn men into marble is most explicit in the description of
Perseus’s political exploits in Cepheus’s palace. There, Medusa’s disembodied head
is used as a weapon to immortalize Perseus’s opponents as cowards in the form of
marble statues. By turning his opponents into statues, Perseus creates dual-purpose
monuments: they are a warning to others who might challenge him (from the Latin
moneo, monere), and they are reminders of Perseus’s victories, visual markers of his
self-aggrandizement. This second point plays an important role in Petrarch’s poetics,
not only in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, but also in the Latin Familiares. As shall
be explored in this article, attributing to Laura-Medusa the power to monumentalize
the poet in marble denies the beloved agency and power over the poet-lover since she
becomes, like Medusa, a tool in the hands of the poet. As Perseus before him,
Petrarch defeats Laura-Medusa and appropriates her agency in a move towards
his own self-aggrandizement. In this light, the Medusa poems help elucidate
Petrarch’s complicated theory of poetic inspiration, something that reaches
beyond the relationship between poet and beloved (source of poetic inspiration in
the lyric collection) to encompass another fraught paradigm of power: the hierarchy
between poet and patron (another source of poetic inspiration). That is, by recalling
the disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of his own beloved, Petrarch is able to
stage his relationship to patronage by recovering the political use of Medusa in the
Perseus myth, and recalling the issue of agency inherent in the myth. Though
Petrarch often presents himself as subservient to the beloved (who has the power
to deny him love, thereby ensuring his salvation), and the patron (who supports the
poet financially), through the Medusa myth he aggrandizes himself by making them
500 Forum Italicum 47(3)

both reliant upon him for their immortality in verse. This paradigm shift – from the
poet serving the beloved and patron, to controlling them – will first be analyzed in the
Medusa poems within the context of the Ovidian subtext and Petrarch’s musings on
marble in the Familiares. I will then examine how Petrarch appropriates this model
to political patronage in the Latin epic Africa, the vernacular poems addressed to the
Colonna patrons, and, finally, the Collatio laureationis. Through the working-out of
his relationship with the figure of the beloved-as-Medusa, Petrarch shows his many
faces: the political prosatore latino, the apolitical love-sick poet, and the independent
‘agent’ (from the Latin agere). As we shall see, Petrarch’s alignment with the
figure of Perseus after the slaying will result in the auto-construction of Petrarch
as a semi-autonomous agent indebted to no one but posterity.

Medusa’s gaze(s)
Scholars have long recognized that the Petrarchan persona that emerges from the
Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is one that speaks with a distinctly different tone than the
one encountered in the Latin works. The authoritative ego of the Latin epistles and
epic is virtually forgotten in the naı̈ve, wounded, fragile, and admittedly fragmented
io of the lyric.7 Much like Dante’s Beatrice in the Vita nova, Laura is presented
throughout the poetic collection as haughty and cruel. Yet her cruelty takes on
many forms depending on her association with mythological figures. As Daphne,
her cruelty is in her refusal to return love – a refusal for which she pays dearly when she
is metamorphosed into a tree.8 As the Medusa, she has the power to turn men into
stone with her gaze. Through her association with the gorgon, Laura appears to wield
power, and enact it, over the poet-lover: she has power over his fate. When the two
myths are presented together, as in RVF 197, ‘L’aura celeste che ‘n quel verde lauro,’
the power of Laura’s gaze becomes more powerful in its comparison to the submis-
siveness of Daphne:9

L’aura celeste che ’n quel verde lauro

spira, ov’Amor ferı́ nel fianco Apollo,
et a me pose un dolce giogo al collo,
tal che mia libertà tardi restauro,

pò quello in me che nel gran vecchio mauro

Medusa quando in selce transformollo;
né posso dal bel nodo omai dar crollo,
là ’ve il sol perde, non pur l’ambra, o l’auro. (1–8)

(The heavenly breeze that breathes in that green laurel, where Love smote Apollo in the
side and on my neck placed a sweet yoke so that I restore my liberty only late,/has the
power over me that Medusa had over the old Moorish giant, when she turned him into
flint; nor can I shake loose that lovely know by which the sun is surpassed, not to say
amber or gold.) (1976: 342)
Feng 501

The series of Ovidian self-identifications in the quatrains presents a conflicting

portrait of the relationship between Petrarch and Laura. The initial identification
with Apollo in the first quatrain recalls the theme of unrequited love that has come to
define the poetic collection as a whole. The appropriation of the Daphne–Apollo
myth is directly linked to the poetic process through the double-reference to the
laurel: the ‘verde lauro’ (‘green laurel’; 1) through which the breeze/beloved blows,
and the ‘dolce giogo al collo’ (‘sweet yoke on my neck’; 3), the laurel crown figured
around his neck. In this case, the power of the beloved is analogous to a constant
wind of inspiration, one that is uncontrollable and that incessantly touches the poet.
In both readings – her analogy to both Daphne, who metamorphoses into a tree, and
also the wind – the beloved is deprived of life. Although the poet suffers from unre-
quited love, as does his Apollonian counterpart, he is not figured as being harmed;
rather, he is deified.
The transition to the second quatrain, however, recalls a second Ovidian myth
which seemingly reverses the consequences that emerge from the analogy to the
Apollo–Daphne myth: as Medusa, Laura is given the power to petrify Petrarch
and deprive him of life, as she did to Atlas. The reference to the gorgon Medusa
portrays Laura in a much different light to the veiled association with Daphne.
Petrarch aligns himself with Atlas, the strongest mortal turned to stone by
Medusa in Book IV of the Metamorphoses:10

viribus inferior (quis enim par esset Atlantis viribus?) ‘at, quoniam parvi tibi gratia
nostra est, accipe munus!’ ait laevaque a parte Medusae ipse retro versus squalentia
protulit ora. quantus erat, mons factus Atlas: nam barba comaeque in silvas abeunt,
iuga sunt umerique manusque, quod caput ante fuit, summo est in monte cacumen, ossa
lapis fiunt. (4.653–660)

(At length, finding himself unequal in strength—for who would be a match in strength
for Atlas? —he [Perseus] said: ‘Well, since so small a favor you will not grant to me, let
me give you a boon’; and, himself turning his back, he held out from his left hand the
ghastly Medusa-head. Straightaway Atlas became a mountain huge as the giant had
been; his beard and hair were changed to trees, his shoulders and arms to spreading
ridges; what had been his head was now the mountain’s top, and his bones were changed
to stones.) (Ovid, 1916: 225)

Petrarch apparently models his relationship with his beloved on that between
Atlas and Medusa: both Atlas and Petrarch are mortals subject to the supernatural
powers of mythic women. Thus, in recalling this second myth, Petrarch bestows
upon Laura the ability to control his fate and to transform him into something
unrecognizable. Yet the parallel is not quite as clear as it first appears. The
Ovidian episode Petrarch recalls in the second quatrain comes after Perseus has
slain Medusa, when the gorgon has lost her own agency. In fact, Atlas is the first
man to be turned to stone by the sight of the disembodied head of Medusa in Book 4
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when he refuses to offer Perseus hospitality in his
502 Forum Italicum 47(3)

kingdom. In this episode, Medusa’s head is used as a weapon by her slayer, whose
physical strength is no match for Atlas, a detail that significantly alters our under-
standing of Petrarch’s appropriation of this Ovidian scene. At first, it would appear
that Petrarch is aligning himself with Atlas, the one who is turned to stone by
Medusa. But when we recall that it is not Medusa herself who petrifies Atlas, but
rather Perseus bearing Medusa’s head, then it would seem that the compliment is
backhanded. For if Laura’s power is like Medusa’s in this episode, then it is like that
of her disembodied head: powerful, certainly, but ultimately directed and appro-
priated by another.
Petrarch’s Medusa is less a living, threatening, powerful female agent, and
more a manipulated and severed head of a prior conquest. When Petrarch returns
to the Medusa myth in the tercets, he figures her always in the same terms that
Ovid does after she is killed, and her power appropriated, by Perseus. As we have
seen earlier, it is only when her head is used as a weapon by Perseus that it turns
men into marble. So when Petrarch rhapsodizes about Laura-Medusa’s petrifying
gaze, we should pause when we notice that it turns him to marble rather than
stone:

dico le chiome bionde, e ’l crespo laccio,

che sı́ soavemente lega et stringe
l’alma che d’umiltate e non d’altr’armo.

L’ombra sua sola fa ’l mio cor un ghiaccio,

et di bianca paura il viso tinge;
ma li occhi ànno vertú di farne un marmo. (9–14)

(I mean the blond locks and the curling snare that so softly bind tight my soul,
which I arm with humility and nothing else./Her very shadow turns my heart to ice
and tinges my face with white fear, but her eyes have the power to turn it to marble.)
(1976: 342)

Laura’s ‘chiome bionde’ (‘blond locks’; 9) are in stark contrast to the classical
image of Medusa with her frightful, serpentine hair. Although at first the use of
‘vertú’ (‘virtue’; 14) to describe the power of her eyes to deprive men of life through a
transformation into marble seems misplaced, perhaps even ironic, it clarifies,
through Ovidian intertext, that the episodes Petrarch recalls in this sonnet concern
Medusa after the slaying.
By figuring Laura as Medusa after the slaying, Petrarch seems to be reser-
ving a measure of control over her influence and her power. The change in her
power’s effects, from stone to marble, furthermore draws attention to the
reversal of what her power represents: from the history-less void of her cave
from which no man ever returns, to the monumentalized fame of Cepheus’s
banquet. When Perseus describes the fallen warriors he sees in the gorgon’s
cave as he proceeds to his encounter with her – ‘passimque per agros/perque
Feng 503

vias vidisse hominum simulacra ferarumque/in silicem ex ipsis visa conversa

Medusa’ (‘On all sides through the fields and along the ways he saw the forms
of men and beasts changed into stone by one look at Medusa’s face’; Ovid,
1916: 232, 779–781) – the implication is that the names of the men, linked
directly to fame, die with them since the only one to learn of their fate is
himself about to die. It is only in Perseus’s hands that the Medusa becomes a
tool of immortality, as illustrated by the wedding banquet scene in Cepheus’s
palace in Book 5 of the Metamorphoses, where petrification into marble is
explicitly linked to fame and exemplarity in the case of Phineus.11 Perseus’s
encounter with Phineus is particularly relevant to Petrarch’s appropriation of
this scene because it is the first time that Medusan petrification is linked
explicitly to fame. Before Phineus turns to marble, Perseus tells him:

‘quod’ ait, ‘timidissime Phineu, et possum tribuisse et magnum est munus inerti, pone
metum! tribuam: nullo violabere ferro. quin etiam mansura dabo monimenta per
aevum, inque domo soceri semper spectabere nostri, ut mea se sponsi soletur imagine
coniunx.’ dixit et in partem Phorcynida transtulit illam, ad quam se trepido Phineus
obverterat ore. (5.224–5.231)

(‘Most craven Phineus, dimiss your fears; what I can give (and ‘tis a great boon for your
coward soul), I will grant: you shall not suffer by the sword. Nay, but I will make of you
a memorial that shall endure for ages; and in the house of my father-in-law you shall
always stand on view, that so my wife [Andromeda] may find solace in the statue of her
promised lord!’ So saying, he bore the gorgon-head where Phineus had turned his fear-
struck face.) (Ovid, 1916: 253, 255)

Perseus promises him immortality through monumentalization, yet to an unex-

pected end: Phineus will be immortalized as a most timid and submissive warrior, as
an example for others to see:

. . . saxoque oculorum induruit umor, sed tamen os timidum vultusque in marmore

supplex submissaeque manus faciesque obnoxia mansit. (5.233–5.235)

(. . . the very tears upon his cheeks were changed to stone. And now in marble was fixed
the cowardly face, the suppliant look, the pleading hands, the whole cringing attitude.)
(Ovid, 1916: 255)

Even though Phineus is the last warrior standing, so to speak, implying that he
was the most courageous and talented of his cohort, he will forever be remembered
as a coward, and will serve as a reminder of Perseus’s victory over him. Whereas
Medusa’s lair is hidden, the stone statuary a silent testimony to the warriors’ failure
to defeat the female monster, the wedding banquet is public, and Phineus is turned
into a monument of Perseus’s victory for Andromeda’s significantly female gaze. By
defeating Medusa, Perseus turns her passive power into an active one, turns her
504 Forum Italicum 47(3)

power to erase men by turning them into earth (stone) into his power to immortalize
men by turning them into public sculpture (marble).
Petrarch’s reference to this specific episode has far-reaching discursive conse-
quences for it echoes Petrarch’s writings on poetic immortality in the Latin
Familiares 24.10, the famous Ode to Horace, where Petrarch privileges the poetic
plume over the tools of a sculptor:12

Sculpunt que rigido marmore durius

Heroas veteres sique firent, novos,
Eternam meritis et memoram notam
Affixam calamo, nequa premat dies. (30–33)
(Your pen carves ancient heroes in something
harder than marble, and, if there be any, new heroes as well
in words of everlasting and eternal praise
such as time cannot erase.) (Petrarca, 1975: 336)

By telling Horace that his pen carves ancient heroes into something harder than
marble, Petrarch compares military power and poetic power. This is similar to what
we witness in the Ovidian scene: military power (Phineus) confronts and loses to the
power of art (Perseus with Medusa’s head). In his final moments of life, Phineus is
immortalized as a coward; his past military accomplishments cease to define him,
and no longer carry meaning. At the heart of the Ovidian episode, and Petrarch’s use
of it, is exemplarity: both Perseus and Petrarch are given the power to confer immor-
tality and create monuments. The key to the ode is recognizing that Petrarch does
not make an equal analogy between writing poetry and sculpting, meaning that
poetry, the written word and the page upon which it is written, is even more immortal
than a sculpture.
The privileging of poetry over sculpting as an artistic medium recurs in RVF 104,
a sonnet addressed to Pandolfo Malatesta, and calls into question the power of the
beloved as Medusa:

L’aspectata vertù, che ’n voi fioriva

quando Amor cominciò darvi bataglia,
produce or frutto, che quel fiore aguaglia,
et che mia speme fa venire a riva.

Però mi dice il cor ch’io in carte scriva

cosa, onde ’l vostro nome in pregio saglia,
ché ’n nulla parte sı́ saldo s’intaglia
per far di marmo una persona viva. (1–8)

(The hoped-for virtue that was flowering in you at the age when Love first gave you bat-
tle, now produces fruits that are worthy of the flower and make my hope come
Feng 505

true./Therefore my heart tells me I should write on paper something to increase your

fame, for nowhere can sculpture be solid enough to give a person life through marble.)
(Petrarca, 1976: 206)

In this sonnet, Petrarch assumes the power he initially seemed to grant Laura
through her association with Medusa by explicitly telling Pandolfo that he will honor
him in verse. His power is to grant everlasting life since in the second quatrain he
claims that nowhere other than ‘in carta’ (‘on paper’; 5) can a sculpture be hard
enough to give someone life through marble. Sculptures proper are frail in compari-
son to the poetic word, as he explains in the tercets:

Credete voi che Cesare o Marcello

o Paolo od Affrican fossin cotali
per incude già mai né per martello?

Pandolfo mio, quest’opere son frali

a
llungo andar, ma ’l nostro studio è quello
che fa per fama gli uomini immortali. (9–14)

(Do you believe that Caesar or Marcellus or Paulus or Africanus ever became
so famous because of any hammer or anvil?/My Pandolfo, those works are frail in
the long run, but our study is the one that makes men immortal through fame.)
(Petrarca, 1976: 206)

Again, military power (represented by the sequence of great rulers, beginning with
Caesar) is given significance only by way of the poet’s pen, not the sculptor’s tools.
The distinction made between the two arts elevates poetry as a living monument.
That is, before the slaying, Medusa purveyed a pure mortality: her gaze turned men
into stone returning them to an elemental earthiness. Her severed head, used as a tool
by Perseus, allowed Perseus to fulfill the role of sculptor, yet even marble is not as
durable as the poetry written by Petrarch using Laura (under the guise of Medusa’s
head) as a tool.
Through a series of Ovidian references, Petrarch undermines the power of
Laura as Medusa by figuring her as Medusa’s severed head, and presenting her
as a tool used in his own poetic process. Leonard Barkan (1986: 209) has
noted: ‘the Medusa, like the Daphne myth in Petrarch’s hands, becomes an
emblem of poetry,’ yet it is the nuances of the myth that have gone unnoticed
by scholars; nuances, moreover, which are central to Petrarch’s concerns about
the power of poetic agency in fixing and altering reputation for history. That
is, Laura’s role in the so-called Medusa sonnets is as her severed head, a
disembodied body part that lacks agency and becomes a tool in the hands
of the poet. It is not Medusa’s power of petrification that characterizes
Petrarch’s appropriation of the myth, it is his ability to harness and wield
her power.
506 Forum Italicum 47(3)

If Petrarch is comparing himself to Perseus, then the traditional view of

Petrarch as being threatened by the power of the female beloved must be
significantly revised. To understand how Petrarch figures his conquest, like
Perseus’s, by appropriating and instrumentalizing the power of the beloved, I
turn now to Petrarch’s exchange with Geri Gianfigliazzi.13 Again employing
Ovid’s Medusa myth, and again turning on the distinction between Medusa as
agent and Medusa as instrument, Petrarch’s advice to Gianfigliazzi lays out the
strategy for the poet’s conquest of the beloved’s agency through a matter of
reflection.
In the first sonnet of the exchange, Gianfigliazzi seeks advice on how to survive
the battle of love – a war he claims Petrarch has already won:

Messer Francesco, chi d’amor sospira

per donna ch’esser pur vuolgli guerrera,
et come più merzé grida, et più gli è fera,
calendogli i duo sol’ che più desira. (1–4)

(Messer Francesco, he who sighs in love for a lady who still wills to be his enemy, and
the more he cries mercy the crueler she is to him, hiding from him the two suns that he
most desires.) (Petrarca, 1976: 608)

Gianfigliazzi begins with a description of unrequited love that summarizes

the power dynamic of Petrarch’s entire poetic collection: Petrarch is inspired
by the love of a woman who wages war on him, yet the more he is spurned,
the more he desires her. Gianfigliazzi claims he is unable to win his love battle
and attributes his defeat to his inability to ‘ragionare’ like Petrarch. As we see
in the tercets, Petrarch is figured as an intellectual, rather than a love-sick
poet:

Voi ragionate con Amor sovente

et nulla sua condition so v’è chiusa
per l’alto ingegno de la vostra mente;

la mia, che sempre mai co llui è usa,

et men ch’al primo il conosce al presente,
consigliate, et ciò fia sua vera scusa. (9–14)

(You speak often with Love, and I know that no condition of his is hidden from you,
thanks to the high wit of your mind./My mind, which has always been with him and
understands him less now than at the beginning, do you counsel; and that will be my
true excuse.) (Petrarca, 1976: 608)

Petrarch’s habit of speaking, or reasoning, with Love seemingly protects him

from perishing. The intellect is figured as Petrarch’s weapon against the beloved in
Feng 507

the war of love – a detail that recalls Perseus and Minerva’s shield. Indeed,
Gianfigliazzi says it is Petrarch’s ‘alto ingegno’ (‘high wit’; 11) that distinguishes
him as a poet-lover, and sets him up as an exemplar for other love poets – a model of
behavior.
Petrarch’s response in RVF 179, ‘Geri, quando talor meco s’adira,’ continues the
thread concerning wisdom (‘alto ingegno’). In this poem, Petrarch recognizes the
power of his beloved, under the guise of Medusa, only to then strip her of that which
has heretofore defined her. In response to the question of how Petrarch manages the
cruelty of his beloved, Petrarch replies:

Ovunque ella sdegnando li occhi gira

che di luce privar mia vita spera
le mostro i miei pien’ d’umiltà sı́ vera,
ch’a forza ogni suo sdegno indietro tira.

E cciò non fusse, andrei non altramente

a veder lei, che ‘l volto di Medusa,
che facea marmo diventar la gente. (5–11)
(Wherever she angrily turns her eyes, who hopes to deprive my life of light, I
show her mine full of such true humility that she necessarily draws back all
her anger./And if that were not so, I would not go to see her otherwise than to
see the face of Medusa, which made people become marble.) (Petrarca, 1976: 324)

Petrarch’s eyes serve the same purpose as Perseus’s shield: they deflect the
harm of the gorgon’s gaze. At the end of Book 4 of the Metamorphoses,
Perseus uses the shield of Minerva – symbol of wisdom – to avoid looking at
Medusa directly (Ovid, 1916: 4.779–4.785). Thus wisdom is understood to medi-
ate Perseus’s sight during the fateful scene: his ability to look beyond Medusa
deflects the gorgon’s power long enough for him to slay her. Yet, in Petrarch’s
response, the detail concerning marble in the tercet (‘’l volto di Medusa,/che facea
marmo diventar la gente,’ ‘the face of Medusa, which made people become
marble’) suggests he is speaking of Medusa’s severed head, when she lacks her
own agency. Furthermore, what is striking here is the implied repetititon of the
scene – he would not otherwise go to see her face if he were not certain that he
was immune to her gaze – which suggests that Petrarch’s power, and his immor-
tality, rests in his ability to look at her and remain alive. He figures himself as a
living marble monument, the Perseus who slays Medusa and can look at her. The
consequence of this for Laura’s representation as Medusa is one of agency, since
Petrarch can choose when to look at Laura-Medusa. At the root of this state-
ment is a conflicting view of poetic inspiration: despite Laura’s paronomastic
presence throughout the landscape, and her portrait which Petrarch carries in
his heart (RVF 90), the poet figures himself as able to seek out and refute poetic
508 Forum Italicum 47(3)

inspiration. Thus, Laura becomes the means through which Petrarch monumen-
talizes himself only when he sees fit.14
Petrarch finalizes his self-aggrandizement in the closing tercet of the sonnet where
we encounter his explicit advice to the lovelorn Gianfigliazzi:

Cosı́ dunque fa’ tu: ch’i’ veggio exclusa

ogni altra aita, e ’l fuggir val nı̈ente
dinanzi a l’ali che ’l signor nostro usa. (12–14)
(You therefore do the same; for I see all other help cut off, and flight avails nothing
against the wings that our lord uses.) (Petrarca, 1976: 324)

Petrarch sets himself up as an example to be followed. He urges his friend not to

flee, as has presumably been his custom, but to instead confront and slay the
beloved-Medusa. The implication is that Gianfigliazzi’s own ‘ingegno,’ like
Minerva’s shield, can protect him and allow him to gaze upon the Medusa without
fear of death. As a result, the figure of the beloved no longer possesses the petrifying
and threatening power she seemed to have as Medusa. Laura is stripped of her
agency, and Petrarch’s conquest over her, through wisdom, becomes the example
he provides Gianfigliazzi in the final tercet.
Petrarch’s advice to Gianfigliazzi imparts the knowledge of how to harness the
negative power of the beloved-Medusa into poetic productivity. Here, we confront
the authoritative voice of a mature poet who has finally come to the realization that
his ‘ingegno’ could conquer the beloved and grant him the power to confer and deny
immortality, much like Perseus. The sonnets about Medusa, thus, become the monu-
ments of the poet’s conquest. This sense of authority is a parody of Dante’s distinc-
tion between the letter and the spirit in the Medusa episode of Inferno 9, since
Petrarch’s lesson to Gianfigliazzi (and, presumably, to the reader) is, essentially,
to look behind the veil. Whereas Dante needed Virgil to cover his eyes to protect
him from the vision of the Medusa, Petrarch looked at her, emerged victorious, and
continued to look at her. Petrarch’s use of Medusa points to a deliberate rejection
of Dante’s eschatological concerns embodied by the Medusa of the Commedia,
passing directly to that other kind of immortality sought after by both poets: self-
monumentality and poetic immortality.

Patrons, beloveds and poetic inspiration

The previous section has shown us the way in which Petrarch undercuts and appro-
priates the very power that he would grant to the beloved. This strategy of reflection
and instrumentalization, of turning the passive and captive beauty of poetry into an
active tool of immortalization and political statement, suggests Petrarch’s concep-
tion of the real political power of poetry. We should not be surprised, then, when we
discover the same strategy of appropriation and reversal in Petrarch’s neo-Latin
humanist works. Mastering that which he would appear to be mastered by,
Feng 509

Petrarch turns to his own masters, the moneyed and powerful patrons, and enacts a
Perseus-like critique and reversal of their power.
Petrarch’s relationship to political figures, and his involvement in a system of
patronage involving families viewed by several of his contemporaries as tyrants,
was a concern even in his lifetime.15 For example, Boccaccio criticized his decision
in 1351 to remain under the patronage of Giovanni Visconti instead of returning to
Florence to not only officially establish himself there, but, most importantly, to
receive the patrimony confiscated from Petrarch’s father upon his and his family’s
exile.16 For Boccaccio, Petrarch’s decision to remain with the Visconti implicated
him in their political tyranny. The discomfort Boccaccio felt regarding Petrarch’s
political ties has been echoed in modern scholarship, as well. Victoria Kirkham’s
recent examination of the five speeches (c. 1353–1373) to ‘promote the politics of
ruling despots’ takes as its subject something that Petrarch scholars have usually
ignored since these speeches sharply contradict the carefully constructed image of
the apolitical poet.17 Scholars have preferred to take Petrarch at his word, believing in
the separation between his public and private personae, as well as politics and poetry.
But, as Kirkham notes, ‘Although they [the speeches] contradict our mythic picture of
Petrarch, they reflect a system of courtly patronage that would flourish in the
Renaissance. ‘‘Rhetoric was the coin that paid for his keep,’’ permitting him leisure
for serious literary projects’ (2009: 10–11). Kirkham’s presentation of Petrarch as a
courtier avant la lettre is a most significant contribution to Petrarch studies because it
recognizes how integral a public figure Petrarch had been for several of his patrons,
despite his claims to the contrary. But she, too, falls into the trap of the poet’s appar-
ent ‘politics of the language’ – that he uses Latin to engage in politics, and the ver-
nacular to distance himself from it – by not connecting the implications of these
speeches to his larger ars poetica. The appropriation of the Medusa myth in his
poetry offers one angle by which this connection between Petrarch’s poetry and pol-
itics can be viewed. Though Petrarch had several patrons, it is in the patronage of
King Robert of Naples and the Colonna family that he employs a strategy of poetic
appropriation in his political rhetoric. That is, Petrarch plays Perseus to his benefac-
tors, turning them to marble in order to mark his own victories.
The framing and narrative structure of Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa – in particular,
the opening dedication to King Robert, and Petrarch’s self-inscription into Book 9 –
complicates the presentation of Petrarch’s relationship to his patron through its
examination of the nature of poetic inspiration and immortality.18 At the onset of
Book 1, Petrarch addresses the monarch in a lengthy aside (72 verses) that praises the
poet as much as it does the dedicatee.19 Petrarch assures the king that the epic will
bring him solace, and that if the reading proves to be burdensome he will be
rewarded in the end with a great reward, ‘. . . nam cunta legenti/Forsitan occurret
uacuas quod mulceat aures/Peniteatque minus suscepti in fine laboris’ (1.24–1.26);
‘and should you find the reading burdensome, the ending may reward you for your
pains’; (1977: 2). This initially begs that the epic be read through an Augustinian
hermeneutic, as established in De Doctrina Christiana, by likening it to Scripture:
the more laborious and difficult the reading, the sweeter the reward that is reaped in
510 Forum Italicum 47(3)

the end. Although this further glorifies the content, the life of Scipio, as well as the
Republic, Petrarch does not claim himself to be a scriba Dei, as does Dante, for
example. Yet, the authorial voice is strengthened in its alignment with a ‘higher
cause,’ a moral authority or exemplum rather than a Christian eschatological one.
Although Petrarch, unlike Dante, does not claim to be concerned with the souls of
his readers, or even of King Robert, by adopting this stance Petrarch is able to make
himself eternal. Both of these aspects decisively inform the way in which the life of
King Robert is depicted in the dedication. Petrarch provides a series of reasons for
which he has not undertaken to write the epic about his patron:

Ipse tuos actus meritis ad sidera tollam

Laudibus, atque alio fortassis carmine quondam
Mors modo me paulum expectet! non longa petuntur
Nomen et alta canam Siculi miracula regis,
Non audita procul, sed que modo uidimus omnes
Omnia. (1.40–1.45)
(For with the praise that you have merited/I shall extol your exploits to the stars,/in a
day to come perchance I may sing of the King of Sicily, his fame/and his miraculous
deeds, not yet well known/abroad but which we all have witnessed.) (Petrarca, 1977: 2)

Initially, it appears as though Petrarch is praising his patron: he has merited praise,
he is famous, and his deeds are miraculous. So praiseworthy is King Robert that
someday Petrarch will laud him in an epic (carmine; in a song). Yet, in praising Robert
of Naples, Petrarch simultaneously undermines his accomplishments and, most
importantly, renders him mortal. That is, the hyperbole used in characterizing his
deeds as miraculous (miracula) is undercut by Petrarch’s claim that Robert’s fame (a
direct result of these miraculous deeds) is not known abroad. His fame is limited to his
court, thus it does not matter that those around him might be able to attest to these
deeds; King Robert lacks an epic, and, by extension, immortality.
Petrarch goes on to explain that it is the practice of poets who undertake the
writing of an epic to turn to ancient times for their subject matter. The excuse seems
valid enough, were it not for the third reason given: that Petrarch’s novice hand
could not do justice to King Robert’s greatness. The topos of humility employed here
is a common rhetorical device, one that implies the poet’s subservience to his patron,
as well as a lack in accomplishments compared to his. However, when we examine
Petrarch’s reasoning more closely, we begin to question whether or not it is King
Robert who is lacking in the greatness required to become the subject of an epic, and
especially, what role he plays in Petrarch’s poetics, when the poet writes:

Nunc teneras frondes humili de stipite uulsi,

Scipiade egregio primos comitante paratus:
Tunc ualidos carpam ramos; tu nempe iuuabis
Materia, generose, tua, calamumque labantem
Feng 511

Firmabis, meritumque decus continget amanti

Altera temporibus pulcerrima laurea nostris. (65–70)

(For the nonce I pluck/the tenderest foliage from a lowly bush/and choose famed Scipio
to share my course./One day I’ll gather sturdier boughs, and you,/most generous King,
will help me with your deeds/and lend more power to my faltering pen./Another crown
of laurel, the most fair/of all our times, will justly then reward/with honor one who
holds your person dear.) (Petrarca, 1977: 3)

Initially Petrarch seems to place Robert above him: he claims that his talents are
not great enough to write an epic in honor of the king, so he has instead chosen
Scipio from a ‘lowly bush.’ Yet, as the passage continues, we see that Robert has not
yet reached the ‘sturdier boughs,’ and his lack of epic is due to his lack of accom-
plishments, not Petrarch’s novice pen. Only his future deeds will enable Petrarch’s
supposedly ‘faltering pen’ to rise to the occasion, implying that the king’s future fame
is beholden to Petrarch’s future writings about him.
The dedication of the poem is meant to glorify King Robert, yet as we have seen,
Petrarch praises him while at the same time pointing out his flaws. After describing
the victories of Scipio Africanus in the eight books that follow, Petrarch closes the
epic by crowning himself (under the guise of the character ‘Franciscus’), and makes
several moves that demonstrate the power of poetry over that of military or political
power, and the way in which poetic agency is negotiated and appropriated. If in Book
1 he claims the king is not ready to be immortalized in an epic, in Book 9 Petrarch
shows that he has already reached the pinnacle of poetic accomplishment by inscrib-
ing himself into the epic. There we encounter Petrarch’s epic hero Scipio and his
biographer Ennius20 on a boat leaving the African shores after his victories. Noting
the poet’s silence on the boat, Scipio implores Ennius to lift their weary hearts with
sweet verse. Surprisingly, Scipio’s biographer has no tale to tell, despite having, one
may assume, witnessed the exploits documented in the previous books of the epic.
Instead, Ennius describes his dream vision of Homer who appeared to him while the
outcome of the war was still in doubt to deliver two prophecies concerning the future
of Latin arms and literature. First, he assures Ennius that Latium would ultimately
succeed in the battle.21 The second prophecy concerning letters is prompted by
Ennius noticing a young man in the distance who uncannily resembles Petrarch:

Hic ego — nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem

Aspexi iuvenem— ‘Dux o carissime, quisnam est,
Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros
Et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo?
Nescio quid, nisi fallor, enim sub pectore versat
Egregiumque altumque nimis’. (216–221)

(There in the distance I could see a youth/seated within a valley closed by hills./I asked:
‘O cherished guide, disclose, I pray,/who is it I behold taking his rest/under the tender
512 Forum Italicum 47(3)

laurel? Lo, he seems/about to bind his locks with those green fronds./I know not
what he ponders in his heart, but surely it must be, unless I err,/some high and noble
purpose.’) (Petrarca, 1977: 230)

Though the young man in the vision is not yet named, there are several clues
that point to Petrarch: the youth is seated ‘within a valley closed by hills,’ an allu-
sion to Petrarch’s preferred haunt Vaucluse, whose etymology means, precisely, a
closed-off valley; he is preparing to crown himself with laurel fronds, a foreshadow-
ing of Petrarch’s own upcoming laurel coronation by King Robert. The reader’s
suspicions that the youth might, indeed, be Petrarch is soon confirmed by Homer’s
response:

Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta,

Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpis in unum
Colliget: Hispanas acies Libieque labores
Scipiadamque tuum: titulusque poematis illi
AFRICA. (9.232–9.236)

(He will be called Franciscus;

and all the glorious exploits you have seen
he will assemble in one volume—
all the deeds in Spain, the arduous Libyan trials;
and he will call his poem Africa. (Petrarca, 1977: 231)

Homer is figured as an Adamic figure, whose power of language calls Petrarch

into being. His prophecy inscribes Petrarch not only into the landscape of the epic
poem, but into Italian history as the poet who returns the Latin muses from exile and
who documents the life and travails of Scipio, the new Aeneas, in an epic poem which
we, as readers, have nearly completed reading. By inscribing himself into his epic of
origins, Petrarch constructs his own fame as the poet of a new Republic and Golden
Age; the age when the muses return to Italy. The self-aggrandizement of such a
metafictional move claims Petrarch for epochs that do not exist: both the past age
of Republican glory and an unknown future time of glory. That it will be a poet who
ushers in this new age privileges the poetic over the military crown, thereby making
King Robert reliant upon Petrarch for his fame, but figuring the poet as the agent
behind his own immortality.
For writing Africa, Petrarch would receive his poetic laurels from King Robert, to
whom he had dedicated his epic poem, in a public ceremony on 8 April 1341 atop the
Capitoline Hill, symbolic seat of Roman military power. A closer look at Africa,
however, shows that Petrarch is playing a sort of Perseus, enlisting the king’s power
to help his own claim for renown while at the same time denying the king self-agency.
The self-coronation by Franciscus essentially refutes the symbolic necessity of the
patron in the immortalization of the poet. By immortalizing himself, Petrarch
emphasizes the notion that it is the poetic pen that bestows immortality upon the
Feng 513

poet, not necessarily the patron. Hence, although the patron and the epic hero both
require a poet for immortality, the poet does not require either. From the classical
auctores the poet receives eloquence, from patrons and heroes the subject matter.
This discursive power play, so to speak, can be read as a critique of King Robert’s
own politics as practiced in his Neopolitan court. Historians have long been fasci-
nated with the prominence of patronage in King Robert’s court, and, as Samantha
Kelly has noted, ‘its function as an engine of royal propaganda’ (2003: 25). Robert’s
rule, it should be remembered, happened only by default. The death of his brother,
Charles Martel, heir apparent to the Angevin dynasty, put Robert in power and
required, in a sense, legitimization. It is here where Kelly’s recent scholarship eluci-
dates a reign in which the patron–poet relationship became so essential. Kelly cata-
logues the various ways in which Robert attempted to legitimize his rule: from the
numerous sermons he wrote, to the attempt at having his deceased brother Louis of
Anjou canonized, to filling his court with secular men of letters. As the historian
notes, ‘[a]s for the men who did attract royal patronage, their humanism turns out to
consist largely of their friendship with Petrarch—a friendship which, in any case,
started with Petrarch’s visit and not in the 1320s’ (2003: 40). Thus, Petrarch’s treat-
ment of Robert in the dedication of the Africa, in comparison to his self-coronation
as poet laureate at the end, seems to acknowledge Robert’s attempt at legitimizing
his political rule through artistic patronage, while simultaneously reminding him
that it is the poet that crowns the king with immortality, revealing Petrarch’s upcom-
ing coronation by the king as purely ceremonial.
The issue at hand is one of agency and the way in which Petrarch turns inside-out
the relationship between those who have passive rule (Medusa, King Robert) and
turn men to stone and those who turn that passivity toward their own purposes
(Perseus, Petrarch) and turn men into marble monuments. Petrarch’s discursive
treatment of Robert in the Africa is similar to the examination of political power
versus poetry in RVF 10, addressed to Giacomo Colonna in c. 1337–1338.22 In this
poem, Petrarch plays with the Latinized form of the Roman Colonna family name,
attributing to them powers traditionally associated with laurel, as a way to eventu-
ally deny them agency in the construction of their fame, much as he did in the case of
Robert and the Africa. Thus, the vernacular lyric space initially carved out for the
poet’s self-reflection becomes a political stage where power is negotiated.
As Santagata has aptly noted, references to the Colonna in the Rerum vulgarium
fragmenta are never explicit: the family is only ever referred to by its Latin surname,
or as figurative ‘columns.’ Because these references have seemed so tenuous, criticism
has been hesitant to read too deeply into the shadowy presence of the Colonna in the
poetic collection. However, these references are considerably strengthened by the
fact that the Colonna coat of arms prominently features a column in the center of
the shield. Petrarch opens the poem by using the figure of the column as a way of
praising the family:

Glorı̈osa columna in cui s’appoggia

nostra speranza e ’l gran nome latino,
514 Forum Italicum 47(3)

ch’ancor non torse del vero camino

l’ira di Giove per ventosa pioggia. (1–4)

(Glorious Column on whom rests our hope and the great renown of Latium, whom even
the ire of Jove in the windy rain has not yet turned aside from the true path.) (Petrarca,
1976: 44)

Petrarch mixes the sacred and the profane in his exaltation of the Colonna family.
He initially pays homage to his patron’s family by emphasizing the Roman roots of
the blood line: he refers to them by the Latinized form of their name – Columna –
which he connects directly to Latium.23 This appeal to their civic and familial pride is
tempered by the allusion to Christ and the pillar of Pilate when Petrarch claims that
‘nostra speranza’ (‘our hope’) rests on the ‘gloriosa columna’(‘glorious column’).
‘Columna’ here evokes the scene of Christ’s flagellation on the column before the
crucifixion: the hope of mankind resides in the man tied to the column by the Roman
guards. Thus, the Colonna are figured as the saviors of mankind, in whom the hope
of humanity resides. This reading elevates the family to the status of moral exem-
plars, pillars of strength. The power of the Colonna seemingly derives from the
etymology and connotations of their name, implicitly confirming, again, Dante’s
assertion in the Vita nova that ‘nomina sunt consequentia rerum’ (‘names are the
consequences of things’) since not even Jove can make the Colonna stray from the
‘vero camino,’ (‘true path’) (Alighieri, 1999: 4).
The claim that the ‘columna’ cannot even be destroyed or deterred by Jove’s
thunderbolts (his wrath) recalls an important property of the laurel tree, rather
than an actual column: according to mythology, the laurel is indestructible, imper-
vious to even Jove’s fury. Thus, the Colonna are defined by a characteristic unique to
the laurel, symbol of immortality and poetic inspiration. This figuration of the
Colonna as a laurel-like column introduces the role of the poet in transforming
ordinary objects into sources of poetic inspiration, a theme that he develops in the
second quatrain where he transforms the urban domestic space of the Colonna
family into a pastoral landscape:

qui non palazzi, non theatro o loggia,

ma ’n lor vece un abete, un faggio, un pino
tra l’erba verde e ’l bel monte vicino,
onde si scende poetando et poggia. (5–8)

(here are no palaces no theater, no gallery, but in their stead a fir tree, a beech, a
pine—amid the green grass and the nearby mountain where we climb and descend
poeticizing.) (Petrarca, 1976: 44)

The civic space occupied by the Colonna is turned into a pastoral retreat that
inspires poetry. The Colonna palaces, theater and loggia are transformed into the fir,
beech and pine trees situated near a mountain which Petrarch climbs and descends
Feng 515

while writing poetry. The culmination of images presents the poet’s ability to trans-
form the symbols that represent the civic power of the Colonna – the column, now
laurel-like, and their property – into the natural elements that inspire the poet. The
transformations do not end there, however, since Petrarch also transforms himself
into a nightingale who occupies the same space as his Colonna patrons:

levan di terra al ciel nostr’intellecto;

e ’l rosigniuol che dolcemente all’ombra
tutte le notti si lamenta et piagne,

d’amorosi penseri il cor ne ’ngombra:

ma tanto ben sol tronchi, et fai imperfecto,
tu che da noi, signor mio, ti scompagne. (9–14)

(all these lift our intellects from earth to Heaven; and the nightingale that sweetly in the
shadow every night laments and weeps/burdens our hearts with thoughts of love. But so
much good you alone cut short and make imperfect, for you keep yourself, my Lord, far
from us.) (Petrarca, 1976: 44)

The initial description of the Colonna as a laurel-like column among pastoral

surroundings not only inspires the poet, raising his intellect to the heavens, but, most
importantly, provides him (the ‘rosigniuol’ of verse 10) with shade. This image of a
poet resting in the shade recalls the description of the laurel tree in Petrarch’s cor-
onation speech.24 Delivered from atop the Capitoline Hill, seat of Roman political,
not poetic, power, Petrarch discussed the significance of the laurel as crown to both
Caesars and poets, in an attempt to delineate the role of the poet in the modern city,
claiming that:

Et preterea arbor hec umbrifera et quieti laborantium accommoda unde est illud
[Horace] oratii XLIIII oda ‘Spissa ramis laurea fervidos/excludet ictus solis’ et illud
eiusdem oda XLVI ‘Longaque fessum militia latus/depone sub lauru mea,’ hoc secun-
dum. Neque hec proprietas incongrue ad cesares refertur ac poetas ut illis post bellorum
his pro laboribus studiorum requies promissa videatur. (Petrarca, 1874: 324)25

(In the second place, the laurel tree is shady, and affords a resting place for those who
labor. Whence comes the lines of Horace in his 44th Ode: ‘Spissa ramis laurea fervidos/
excludet ictus solis,’ and in his 46th ‘Longaque fessum militia latus/depone sub lauru
mea.’ Not inappropriately is this property of the laurel associated with Caesars and with
poets: for it may symbolize the rest that is in store for the former after their toils in
warfare, and for the latter after their toils in study.) (Wilkins, 1955: 309–310)

In the coronation speech, the laurel tree is figured as providing shade for the
political leader and poet, both of whom are rewarded with immortality for their
respective labors. In RVF 10, however, the poet-nightingale is shaded by the
516 Forum Italicum 47(3)

‘columna’ and the various Colonna civic spaces that are figured as trees. Thus, the
position of the patron in the analogy has changed in the poem: the Colonna patron is
not figured as residing under the shadow of the laurel with the nightingale (Petrarch),
rather he is the source of shade. On the one hand, presenting the patron as a symbolic
laurel tree figuratively acknowledges his role as Petrarch’s protettore and implies a
natural relationship between the poet-nightingale and his patron; on the other hand,
the patron is denied the immortality associated with the political laurel crown
through military triumphs, and is transformed into a source of inspiration that
enables poetic production.
By attributing laurel-like attributes to the patron-as-column, the Colonna patron
is aligned with the figure of Daphne, and by extension Laura in that he is granted the
same properties bestowed upon the beloved through paronomasia (lauro–Laura).
Thus, just as a poet needs a beloved, so too does he need a patron, yet both figures are
presented as tools of inspiration, lacking in their own agency. Petrarch does not
describe the accomplishments of the Colonna in his verses; rather, he describes what
they have to offer him: the means and place to write his poetry, and the raw materials
for his subject. Though in this poem the Colonna patron is denied a place under the
laurel tree, and the immortality associated with the political laurel crown, Petrarch
does immortalize him by transforming him into a source of poetic inspiration.

Conclusion
As has been explored in this article, the figure of Petrarch’s Medusa is as multi-
faceted and as complex as she is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I have argued that the key
to Petrarch’s Medusa poems is recognizing Petrarch’s alignment with Perseus after
the slaying when the disembodied head of Medusa becomes a poetic tool of self-
aggrandizement. That Laura-Medusa has the ability to turn Petrarch into marble,
rather than stone, points to the beloved’s lack of agency. That Petrarch can look at
her repeatedly, and at will, nuances the paradigm of power between poet-lover and
beloved that has generally characterized his lyric collection. There is no denying that
the religious and eschatological implications of petrification that have been argued
by several scholars elucidate an important aspect of Petrarch’s writings about reli-
gion and his own battle with the double aspect of gloria. Indeed, it is an integral part
of the myth the poet himself creates, not only within the lyric collection, but also in
the Secretum and Triumphi. However, reading Petrarch’s Medusa as solely an obs-
tacle to Paradiso limits our understanding of the multi-faceted dimension of
Petrarch’s larger cultural project and œuvre. In particular, the traditional approach
to Laura-Medusa has taken for granted both how close a reader Petrarch was of his
favored classical authors – in this analysis, Ovid – and also the often intersecting
trajectories of his vernacular and Latin cultural projects. By denying Laura-Medusa
the power of agency in his vernacular poems, Petrarch is able to figuratively harness
the power of immortalization, emphasizing the poetic process as a means toward this
end – a preeminent topic in his Latin works. Petrarch’s denial of Laura-Medusa’s
power over him mirrors the way in which he treats his patrons in the two examples
Feng 517

presented from the Latin Africa and Colonna poem. Thus, the poet’s encounters
with Medusa, and his recovery of the political use of Medusa in Ovid, allows him to
stage his relationship to his patrons and present patronage and love as similar sys-
tems of power ultimately controlled by the poet’s ability to bestow or deny immor-
tality upon others.
Albert R Ascoli has noted a similar use of Medusa in Coluccio Salutati’s appro-
priation (or rather, allegorization) of the myth in his De laboribus Herculis, noting
that, ‘He [Salutati] allegorizes the shield [of Jove, upon which appears the head of
Medusa] as well as Medusa herself, as poetic eloquence, the power of rhetoric to both
illuminate and control’ (1987: 166). The connection made between Medusa’s head
and the double-nature of rhetoric, as both a force that illuminates (makes clear) and
controls, is palpable in the figure of Petrarch’s Medusa. The poet’s deliberate com-
parison between the art of poetry and the art of sculpting is more reminiscent of
Petrarch’s discussions of military power than that of neo-Platonic love. Military
heroes, not beloveds, are immortalized in statues as visible examples of admirable
behavior. Yet, both are immortalized in poetry, something more durable than
marble, since it is the poet’s retelling of a hero’s story that grants him fame and
immortality; the image of the hero requires a narrative for exemplarity to take effect.
The privileging of poetry and the poet’s pen that begins in the Medusa poems and is
restaged in other works, both Latin and vernacular, thus emphasizes a theme that
recurs throughout Petrarch’s Latin works: that military power is transient and the
poet’s pen immortal. A more comprehensive understanding of Petrarch’s ars poetica,
one that takes into account the intellectual intersections between his Latin and ver-
nacular works, points to an emerging theory of the causality exerted by human art
that informs his larger humanist project.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
non-profit sectors.

Notes
1. All citations from Petrarch’s vernacular poetry are taken from Santagata’s critical edition
(Petrarca, 2001). Translations are by Robert Durling (Petrarca, 1976).
2. See Brand et al. (1962).
3. Namely, RVF 51, 179, and 197. Petrarch dedicates two verses to Laura-Medusa in RVF 366
(vv. 111–112).
4. Although beyond the scope of this article, Petrarch’s portrayal of Laura as Medusa seems
to echo certain aspects of the ‘stony woman’ in Dante’s Rime petrose, as has been well noted
by Antoni (1983) and Durling (1975; Petrarca, 1976). The most comprehensive study of
Dante’s so-called ‘minor’ poetic collection is Durling and Martinez (1990), but see also
Fenzi (1966). For Dante’s appropriation of the figure of Medusa, see especially Ascoli
(1987); J Freccero (1979, 2003); Mazzotta (1979).
5. For Petrarch’s punning on his name, see especially Cesarini’s seminal article (1987).
518 Forum Italicum 47(3)

6. It is interesting to note the reversal in Petrarch’s application of the idea that ‘names are the
consequences of things.’ Whereas Dante famously uses this phrase to explain why his
beloved Beatrice was thus named (Beatrice, she who blesses), Petrarch applies the maxim
to himself, rather than Laura.
7. For the representation of Petrarchan subjectivity, see especially Greene (1968). See also
Mazzotta (1993: Chapter 3); Scaglione (1989); Trinkaus (1970).
8. For the importance of the Daphne–Apollo myth in Petrarch’s poetry, see Sturm-Maddox
(1983, 1992); DellaNeva (1982). For general discussions of Petrarch’s appropriation of
Ovid’s Daphne, see C Freccero (2001); Enterline (1994); Hardie (1999).
9. This is the second of the three ‘l’aura’ poems that present the beloved as the wind: RVF
196, 197, 198.
10. The Atlas episode is Met. 4.621–4.663. All references to and translations of the
Metamorphoses are taken from the Loeb edition (Ovid, 1916).
11. Although in this book Perseus uses Medusa’s head to turn other warriors into marble –
Thesceleus, (‘utque manu iaculum fatale parabat mittere, in hoc haesit signum de mar-
more gestu,’5.182–5.183), and Astyages (‘naturam traxit eandem, marmoreoque manet
vultus mirantis in ore,’ 5.205–5.206) – Phineus is the only one set up as an examplum, and a
monument.
12. All citations from Petrarch’s Familiares are taken from Rossi’s critical edition, Le
Familiari (Petrarca, 1933). Translations are by Aldo S Bernardo (Petrarca, 1975).
13. See Santagata (Petrarca, 2001: 790) for a full transcription of the poem by Gianfigliazzi,
to which Petrarch responds with RVF 179. Translation by Durling (Petrarca, 1976:
Appendix 1, p. 608).
14. See William J Kennedy’s reading of this sonnet as a Horatian configuration of art as
mechanical and technical skill, in line with medieval economic theories of labor and utility
value (2011).
15. The most general discussion of Petrarch’s relationship to the various tyrants of his
day continues to be that of Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1963). For more recent critical
studies see Ascoli (2011: Chapter 4); Simonetta (2004); Wallace (1997); and
Wojciehowski (1995).
16. The letter, dated 18 July 1351, is Epistle V in Ricci’s edition (Boccaccio, 1965).
17. Introduction, p. 10, Kirkham and Maggi (2009). See especially Kirkham’s chapter,
‘Petrarch the Courtier.’
18. Scholarship devoted solely to Petrarch’s Africa is scarce. Most recently, Simone Marchese
(2009) has highlighted the work as the centerpiece of Petrarch’s larger project of self-
fashioning and self-promotion as the leading poet-historian of his age. See also Bernardo
(1962); Colilli (1988: Chapter 3); Fenzi (2003); Ferra (1984); Festa (1926); Velli (1965).
19. Latin citations from the Africa are taken from Nicola Festa’s critical edition (Petrarca,
1998). Unless otherwise noted, English translations are from the Bergin and Wilson
translation (Petrarca, 1977).
20. It is important to remember that Petrarch’s choice of Scipio as his epic hero is an odd one,
since he had already been immortalized in the Annales of Ennius.
21. ‘Nec cura future/ Solicitet casus. Quoniam lux crastina campos/ Sanguine Penorum Latio
victore rigabit’ (1998: 212–214); ‘Be not moved/by thought of misadventures yet to come;/
under the light of morn the fields will run/with Punic blood as Latium rules the day.’(1977:
230)
22. Although the specific identity of the Colonna patron in this poem has been contested by
scholars, I follow Santagata’s theory that Petrarch sends the sonnet from Valchiusa to
Feng 519

Giacomo Colonna in Rome between 1337 and 1338. As Santagata notes, Carducci iden-
tified the addressee as Stefano Colonna il Vecchio, arguing that Petrarch sent it on behalf
of his son Giacomo and the family in the summer of 1330, urging Stefano to join the
family in Lombez (where Giacomo was bishop). Durling appears to follow this hypoth-
esis, noting that Petrarch had spent the summer of 1330 with the family in France
(Petrarca, 1976: note on p. 44).
23. This is at odds with the way in which Petrarch will later describe his patrons. For example,
Petrarch attacks the legitimacy of Colonna power by exposing them as foreign-born
tyrants in Variae 48 of 1347, the hortatory letter sent to Cola di Rienzo and
the Roman people after the former’s coup (Petrarca, 1996). Although RVF 10 was writ-
ten in the late 1330s, Santagata notes that it was re-ordered as the tenth poem in the
collection in the early 1350s, which would coincide with the years immediately following
Cola’s fall.
24. For a discussion of the structure, manuscript tradition, publication history and textual
variants of Petrarch’s Collatio laureationis see especially Feo (1990). More recently,
Dennis Looney (2009) has read the coronation speech as Petrarch’s earliest theorizing
of the revival of the poet as an integral part of an emerging modern city.
25. Citations from the Latin Collatio are taken from Petrarca (1874). English translations are
by E Wilkins (1955).

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